Jim Crow

Chicago.--"What do you remember most about Thurgood Marshall?'' I am asked repeatedly as I tour the nation promoting ''Dream Makers,'' my story of his life.I think first of his withering wit in the courtroom. When a Virginia lawyer argued that black and white children couldn't attend the same schools, Marshall snapped: ''It is interesting to me that the very people who object to sending their white children to school with Negroes are eating food that has been prepared, served and almost put in their mouths by the mothers of those children.

When Baltimore sculptor James Earl Reid created the city's first memorial to the stunningly gifted jazz singer Billie Holiday in 1985, something was missing. Gone were the panels containing references to the Jim Crow era and the lynching that Holiday so chillingly recounted in the ballad "Strange Fruit." Now Reid has a chance to remedy what he calls censorship by city officials, by adding the bronze panels for today's rededication of the statue on the 50th anniversary of her death. The striking, 8-foot-6-inch-high, 1,200-pound likeness of the Baltimore-born Holiday, wearing a strapless gown, with her trademark gardenias in her hair and her mouth open in song, will now rest on a 20,000-pound base of solid granite, as Reid had intended all along.

Acknowledging an increase of intolerance and that "we are not one nation," former Congressman Kweisi Mfume challenged Goucher College graduates yesterday to fix the problems created "by those in my time," while fighting poverty and violence."

POP MUSIC The Roots Check out the annual Johns Hopkins Spring Fair, featuring a beer garden, food vendors, craft stands, interactive literacy events for kids, a carnival and music events. It runs Friday through Sunday on the Homewood campus, 3400 N. Charles St., and admission is free. As part of the festivities, hip-hop band the Roots performs at 7 p.m. Saturday on the Ralph O'Connor Recreation Center Practice Field. Tickets are $25 for the general public and $10 for Johns Hopkins students with valid student IDs. For more information, including ticketing, go to jhuspringfair.

C. Vann Woodward, a respected historian of the South whose most famous work the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called the "historical bible of the civil rights movement," died Friday at his home in Hamden, Conn. He was 91.Mr. Woodward taught at the Johns Hopkins University from 1947 to 1961. He regarded himself as an old-fashioned storyteller who was as interested in the literature and culture of the South as he was in its turbulent economics and politics of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The image of one woman buffing another woman's nails in a railroad dining car struck Keith Gabel. Their hairstyles are clearly from another era. But the black woman is dressed as a servant in the black-and-white photo from the early 1900s, an image that Gabel said highlighted their different roles during that period. "It's kind of glaring, when you saw that," said the Bel Air resident, visiting the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum's Black History Month exhibit yesterday. Various displays highlight the experiences of African-Americans as both railroad passengers and employees from the start of Jim Crow laws after the Civil War through desegregation.

Thurgood Marshall is retiring, and people are using words like ''giant'' to describe him. Giant he is, to be sure. But 61 years after the University of Maryland refused to let him into its law school, 37 years after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education loosed black ambitions that had seemed permanently walled away, Americans have forgotten the conditions that combined to make the man the revolutionary he became.To see Thurgood Marshall as a mere disgruntled dissenter, stepping down after 23 years on the Supreme Court, isolated and far to the left of ''mainstream'' politics, is to ignore the history Justice Marshall can never forget.

At-large elections don't represent all Far from being "the more democratic system" as described by many Harford County residents, at-large representation should be denounced as the instrument of racism that it clearly is in a county with such stark ethnic dividing lines. Uncritical support of such is shameful in this day and age. My observations aren't expressed to endorse any political position, but rather to address a fundamental issue of fairness and respect. The equitable solution to the issues of conflicted boundaries for police, fire companies and rec councils is to adjust the boundaries, not institute the de facto disenfranchisement of a portion of our diverse citizenry.

When Baltimore sculptor James Earl Reid created the city's first memorial to the stunningly gifted jazz singer Billie Holiday in 1985, something was missing. Gone were the panels containing references to the Jim Crow era and the lynching that Holiday so chillingly recounted in the ballad "Strange Fruit." Now Reid has a chance to remedy what he calls censorship by city officials, by adding the bronze panels for today's rededication of the statue on the 50th anniversary of her death. The striking, 8-foot-6-inch-high, 1,200-pound likeness of the Baltimore-born Holiday, wearing a strapless gown, with her trademark gardenias in her hair and her mouth open in song, will now rest on a 20,000-pound base of solid granite, as Reid had intended all along.

I always have a good laugh when you run your "Red Maryland" column, and the most recent exercise in pointless drivel was no exception ( "To help children, start in the womb," Jan. 31). First of all, just to state a simple yet obvious fact that seems to elude some people: an embryo is not a person and no amount of wishing it is so will make it true. A baby is born when it draws its first breath. In fact, the Bible (which these right wing ignoramuses always reference, but none of them seems to bother to read or understand)

The image of one woman buffing another woman's nails in a railroad dining car struck Keith Gabel. Their hairstyles are clearly from another era. But the black woman is dressed as a servant in the black-and-white photo from the early 1900s, an image that Gabel said highlighted their different roles during that period. "It's kind of glaring, when you saw that," said the Bel Air resident, visiting the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum's Black History Month exhibit yesterday. Various displays highlight the experiences of African-Americans as both railroad passengers and employees from the start of Jim Crow laws after the Civil War through desegregation.

DENVER - Sen. Barack Obama is the Democratic Party's presidential nominee by virtue of his own talent, but he stands on the shoulders of Americans who built, over many decades, a more welcoming social and political landscape in this country. At a party before Mr. Obama's acceptance speech, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the House majority leader, observed that Americans have just seen a presidential primary campaign that, for the first time, featured a black man and a woman who each had a serious chance of winning.

While researching my civil rights book, I gave a brief work-in-progress talk at a woman's club in Baltimore. A member of the audience came up to me afterward to make this observation about the task I was beginning to confront: "You'll never get the ambience of those days." I thought I knew what she meant. Jim Crow discrimination was sustained by a level of passion that might be difficult to convey. And there was the fact that while I had grown up at the end of the Jim Crow era in North Carolina, I had not grown up black.

Forty years ago today, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. The night before he died, the Nobel Peace Prize winner delivered a speech predicting the nation's future and his own demise. Dr. King prophesied that, while he likely would not live to see the day, he had no doubts that all Americans, including blacks, would some day "get to the promised land" of racial equality. Four decades after Dr. King's death, Barack Obama, the U.S. Senate's only black member, may become America's first black president.

Even before a charismatic black leader reached across the racial divide, Marylanders were setting out in search of deeper understanding. Several ominous incidents - a case of arson and nooses of uncertain origin - lent urgency to the mission. Then last week, Sen. Barack Obama daringly made a call for racial groups to explore attitudes and assumptions. He made his appeal a tenet of his presidential campaign - an unprecedented challenge. He felt obliged to address the controversial remarks of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Notes Maryland's strange history of Jim Crow: It's impossible to consider Maryland's past and not be struck by the irony of race relations in the Free State. The birthplace of the nation's greatest abolitionists, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, was also the home of slavery's staunchest defender, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the infamous Dred Scott decision. Sun columnist C. Fraser Smith explores the state's past and the effects Jim Crow segregation laws had on everyday Marylanders in his new book Here Lies Jim Crow, to be published by the Johns Hopkins University Press this summer.

HAVING grown up as an African-American in a poor, rural area of Kentucky in the 1950s, I know what it feels like to think success is out of reach.My single mother, my brother and I first lived in a house with no indoor plumbing. For us, moving to a public housing project was an improvement. But relocating didn't solve one major challenge for my family -- there was little in our environment to help us achieve success.Yet I am living proof that there is hope, and that our society knows how to create opportunity for all children, poor or not. The recent opening of a Boys & Girls Club at Pleasant View Gardens in East Baltimore is just such an opportunity.

If he'd said it of Jews, he would still be apologizing. If he'd said it of blacks, he'd be on BET, begging absolution. If he'd said it of women, the National Organization for Women would have his carcass turning slowly on a spit over an open flame. But he said it of the poor, so he got away with it. "He" is South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, running for governor on the GOP ticket. Speaking of those who receive public assistance, he recently told an audience, "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals.

Samuel Weinblatt, a retired insurance man who forged lasting relationships with Baltimore's Chinese community whom he befriended and served for more than 60 years, died Thursday of myasthenia gravis at Sunrise Brighton Gardens of Pikesville. He was 93. Mr. Weinblatt, the son of Russian immigrants, was born and raised in a Bond Street rowhouse. While attending City College from which he graduated in 1932, Mr. Weinblatt befriended Jimmy Wu, who became a lifelong friend and a well-known restaurateur and whose New China Inn on North Charles Street was a popular destination for decades.

Last month, about one hour after my arrival in Atlanta to visit a family member, I was confronted, once again, with the burden that all black men in this country face on a daily basis. I was standing in front of my relative's home in an upscale neighborhood, surveying the beauty that surrounded me, when a white woman in her early 30s approached me, with her dog, from across the street. She asked me, in a rather hostile voice, "Are you waiting for someone?" I responded by saying, "Good afternoon.